Admiring Light

Photography Reviews, Photos, News and Musings

I’m not much of a star photos guy. At least, I haven’t been in the past. Not because I don’t enjoy seeing super late night images with the stars gleaming, but because I live near a fairly large city, and light pollution makes capturing images of the stars problematic. It requires a drive a good …

Olympus has been on a roll lately. While many of their early Micro 4/3 lens options were decent optically, the build quality was generally lacking and there was a lack of any really stellar optics. This has all changed since 2011. Olympus has switched gears somewhat and started catering to the high-end shooter who wants …

Sony’s been fleshing out their full frame FE lens lineup for E-Mount fairly quickly over the past year and a half, as the total FE system is now up to 11 native AF lenses. One of the newest lenses to hit the street is aimed squarely at the professional and enthusiast with the no-compromises Zeiss …

Samsung has been somewhat stealthily building a fairly strong lens lineup for their NX cameras over the past few years, and today I’m taking a look at what is often the core lens in a high-end lens lineup: the fast standard zoom. Samsung’s 16-50mm f/2-2.8 joins an elite group of standard zooms for interchangeable lens …

Fuji is a relative newcomer to the mirrorless game, and they’ve taken a different strategy than the other players in this market. Fuji has eschewed the entire low-end market and decided to focus on prosumer and professional users exclusively. Last year, they introduced the X-Pro 1, a relatively large body with a hybrid optical and …

Early this year, Sony announced three new members of a new lens line, the “G Master” line, to denote top end professional grade lenses. Two of them are the key pro-grade zoom lenses that are essential to high-end systems: the 24-70mm f/2.8 and the 70-200mm f/2.8, while also releasing a fast portrait prime in the …

How wide can an ultra-wide go? It’s a question you’ll find yourself asking when you get ready to mount the Voigtländer 10mm f/5.6 Hyper-Wide Heliar: the widest rectilinear lens ever made for a camera. As soon as you look through the viewfinder with this lens mounted, you’ll have your answer: almost unfathomably wide. The 10mm …

With the introduction of Sony’s A7 and A7r mirrorless cameras, the E-Mount gains new life, but also some new complications. Existing E-Mount lenses are designed to cover an APS-C image circle, and as such, a new line of lenses is required to cover the full-frame image sensors in these new Sony flagships. When the cameras …

The normal prime range in the Sony FE mount is beginning to get quite crowded. Today I’m looking at the latest f/1.4 lens in this range, the Zeiss FE 50mm f/1.4 Planar T*, which is the fastest of the native FE mount normal primes. Sony also offers the excellent 55mm f/1.8, the 50mm f/1.8, and …

Sony continues to crank out new lenses, and the release this summer of the new Zeiss branded FE 50mm f/1.4 ZA Planar T* came as a bit of a shock, considering there is already a Zeiss branded normal prime that is widely considered to be one of the best autofocus normal lenses ever made, but …

While I have still been extremely busy at my full-time job, I took a bit of vacation this week to go try to catch some of the fall foliage around Ohio. I went to explore some places up around Cleveland on Monday, before heading to Hocking Hills for a short jaunt this morning. It was …

If you’re relatively new to photography, you often focus on the technical aspects: making sure that you know how all the camera settings affect the output and so on. These things are critically important, but eventually become background knowledge as they become ingrained in your consciousness. Then, you will often move to perfecting composition: finding that …

As you’ve probably discovered, I was unable to attend Photokina this year, which I was quite upset about, as I had an absolute blast there two years ago. I also love being able to visit Germany when ever I can. However, I still think it’s worth looking at some of the new gear that was …

I live in Ohio, and there are a lot of nice things about Ohio, but few would consider it a prime destination for landscape photography. If you’ve come to this site for a while, you’ve gotten used to seeing shots from around Columbus, where I live, and places nearby. Occasionally I’ll get to make a …

If you’ve been a regular visitor to Admiring Light, you’ve probably noticed (and perhaps even been frustrated by) the lack of new articles over the past few months. I apologize for that. I’ve been absolutely swamped at my full-time job and have had less time than I’ve ever had for shooting and writing. I hope …

Fuji kicked off the X-series with the original X100, a camera that had a distinct retro aesthetic, great image quality and an optical viewfinder. It made waves and eventually led to Fuji’s successful X-Series of interchangeable lens cameras. The X100 has seen two more iterations, and today I’m looking at the newest ‘little brother’ of …